Part: Short Life Housing

by Cris Cheek

Poetry. This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK-born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s--the so-called "linguistically-innovative poetry" grouping later anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke's FLOATING NEW POETS FROM LONDON. Likewise, he became central to developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a prolific, genre-slipping poet, performance artist and musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which SHORT LIFE HOUSING goes far to rectify. "Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here's an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighborhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens' dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That's at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you'll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume"--Caroline Bergvall.

259 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2009